Several European and North American states encourage or even require, via good Samaritan and duty to rescue laws, that persons assist others in distress. This paper offers a utilitarian and contractualist defense of this view as applied to corporations. It is argued that just as we should sometimes frown on bad Samaritans who fail to aid persons in distress, we should also frown on bad corporate Samaritans who neglect to use their considerable multinational power to undertake disaster relief or to confront widespread social ills such as those currently befalling public health (obesity) and the environment (climate change). As such, the corporate duty to assist approach provides a novel justification for sustainable business practices in such cases. The paper concludes by arguing that traditional stakeholder approaches have not articulated this duty of assistance obligation, though a new utilitarian stakeholder theory by Thomas Jones and Will Felps may be coextensive.

This paper provides an analysis of conscience-based refusals in healthcare from a Sartrean view, with an emphasis on the tension between individual responsibility and professional role morality. Conscience-based refusals in healthcare involve healthcare workers refusing to perform actions based on core moral beliefs. Initially this appears in line with Sartrean authenticity, which requires acknowledgment that one is not identical with professional role. However, by appealing to Sartre’s later social thought, I show that professional role morality is authentic when one considers common group practices, which Sartre refers to as pledged group praxis. I demonstrate that for healthcare providers, authenticity mandates putting the goals and generally accepted praxis of healthcare front and center in the workplace decision process. I conclude by strengthening Andrew West’s existentialist decision-making model with Sartre’s later social thought. With the updated model, I show that for healthcare workers most often the authentic decision is to perform generally accepted healthcare procedures in spite of individual moral qualms. This is because working in healthcare necessitates viewing one’s professional tasks in their broader social context—as unified, communal group praxis.

Wisdom includes the practical application of knowledge, experience, reason, introspection, and intuition, but does its presence impact the ethical attitudes of individuals within organizations? Using Ardelt’s three-dimensional wisdom scale (2003) and a revised version of the ethical attitude measures developed by Wood, Longenecker, McKinney, and Moore (1988), empirical analysis was conducted using 329 responses from non-instructional staff at three colleges located in the southeast. This study is among the first to empirically test the impact of wisdom in a business setting, and also to empirically test the relation between wisdom and ethical attitudes. Correlation and regression analysis results indicated that greater wisdom was positively related to ethical attitudes and the rejection of questionable business practices that are harmful to others and the environment. Also, age was found to be positively related to an individual’s rejection of ethically questionable activities. These findings suggest that developing and encouraging higher levels of wisdom among employees within an organization will likely result in more ethical business practices.

Business ethics educators have been encouraged to cultivate students’ character, but have received meager instructions for doing so. Additionally, there has been insufficient focus on equipping students with the tools they need to foster their ethical development after completing our courses. In this paper, it is argued that the Jewish spiritual practice of Mussar, whose premise is that individuals can become better versions of themselves by repairing their character traits, can inform business ethics instruction. After presenting the tenets and historical background of Mussar, we provide specific information that will enable business ethics instructors to adapt its tools and techniques in order to put their students on a personalized path of lifelong character improvement.

In recent times there have been increasing efforts at reinterpreting core CSR theories such as stakeholder theory with new perspectives as well as applying them to different contexts away from its Western masculinist connotations. This work seeks to add to these efforts by exploring the impacts that the African philosophical worldview of Afro-communitarianism has on small business stakeholder relationships. Specifically it discusses the kinds of relationships that owner/managers of small businesses, in adherence to Afro-communitarianism, maintain with their families, employees, local communities and competitors- all key stakeholders. The contention is that such ethics demand more extensive ethical responsibilities from owner/managers of small businesses than owner/managers motivated by traditional stakeholder theory with its Western masculinist undertones. It is hoped that this effort will add significant perspectives to stakeholder theory as well as having implications for both small and large business practice.

Despite attention to the concerns of labor migration by public policy makers and scholars, the effects of international recruitment policies in developed nations on the economies of the developing world have been largely unaddressed by management literature. This work addresses that lacuna by combining hitherto separate streams of management scholarship with the fledgling fields of nation and employer branding to consider their synthesis in an international context. This combination introduces the possibility for evaluating the effects of recruitment practices on developing economies and creates space for future research regarding ethical international recruitment policies. We explore and discuss these issues from the perspective of potential employees in developing economies and offer suggestions to guide future research in this area.

Organizational theory argues that institutional social responsibility, which represents managers’ moral values, ethics, and norms (i.e. community, environment), and technical (strategic) social responsibility, which represents firms’ relationship with key stakeholders (i.e., employees, suppliers, consumers), influence corporate ethical behavior. We examine and compare the impacts of strengths and concerns of institutional and technical (strategic) social responsibilities on the likelihood of corporate fraud. Using a sample of 152 high-profile corporate fraud cases in the U.S. during the 2000-2010 period, we find that firms’ corporate social responsibility activities reduce the likelihood of corporate fraud. More importantly, our study finds that both institutional strengths and technical strengths reduce the likelihood of corporate fraud. Institutional concerns also increase the likelihood of corporate fraud and institutional responsibility plays a more significant role than technical responsibility. Our study supports the legitimacy theory of social responsibility and highlights the importance of moral management to reduce the likelihood of corporate fraud.

Benefit corporation legislation has rapidly disseminated in the United States. Its advocates claim it is a necessary corporate form to address the unique needs of for-profit social enterprises, despite many scholarly and legal practitioners who doubt the need for or wisdom of adopting this organizational form. Others suggest that the legislation is flawed and deficiencies should be addressed. After reviewing the present status of benefit corporation legislation, this article contributes to the discourse arguing that (1) benefit corporations are unnecessary under the law; (2) benefit corporation legislation does not enhance corporate law; (3) benefit corporation laws create unnecessary new legal risks for both traditional and benefit corporations, and their respective directors; and (4) third party certification in entity formation law is inappropriate.

This paper describes the general disregard for relationships that leads to unethical behavior in business as well as in one’s personal life, using an illustration from 4,000 years ago and from today. Volkswagen has been characterized as just one more example of ethical violations that lead to long-lasting environmental, financial, and personal impacts. The story of Jacob’s life reflects the origin of this type of ethical behavior and stands in parallel to the eighty-year history of the Volkswagen corporation.

It is important for philosophers to find out positive approaches for increasing mutual understanding on those fundamental questions in both the Confucian and Aristotelian traditions of doing virtue ethics. The Aristotelian concept of the good and the Confucian concept of dao pose a question about the way human beings see the final principle of ethics. Staying within the realm of human life, Confucius develops two co-related perspectives of seeing the dao of human being. The first perspective sees the dao as standing for the ultimate truth and goodness for human beings. Setting aside the Aristotelian metaphysics of nous, this conception does not stand that far removed from Aristotle’s view of the good. The second perspective sees the dao as the right way for individuals to start. This notion seems far from Aristotle’s view of right choice. The reason is that Confucius’s manner of comprehension embraces both understanding and insight, while that of Aristotle focuses solely on understanding. But Aristotle’s concept of right choice is, in some indirect way, related to Confucius’s view of the right way. For both Confucius and Aristotle, the right way refers to our initiating acting on something connected to the end with no more thinking.

This paper attempts to build on the contribution to moral imagination theory by Patricia Werhane by further integrating moral imagination with new theoretical developments that have taken place in the business ethics field. To accomplish this objective, part one will review the concept of moral imagination, from its definitional origins to its full theoretical conceptualization. Part two will provide a brief literature review of how moral imagination has been applied in empirical research. Part three will analyze and apply the construct of moral imagination as it relates to the key process stages of ethical decision making including awareness, judgment, intention, and behavior. Immoral imagination is then discussed, along with other behavioral ethics concepts as they relate to moral imagination. The paper concludes with potential future research directions, as well as teaching and managerial implications for the moral imagination construct.

Using Daoism expressed by Chuang Tzu and the Confucianism in The Analects, The Great Learning, and the Mencius, this paper compares and contrasts Daoism and Confucianism as business ethics. In addition, it applies Daoism and Confucianism to several business cases.

The managers of colleges and universities have to make decisions on a wide range of issues with regard to goals and how they may be pursued. “Managers” refers to such positions as the president, provost, vice president dean, and director of a university. This paper lays out the theoretical basis for the right answer for these decisions. It does so by setting out the fundamental function of an academic institution, linking this function to a duty, and explaining how to satisfy this duty in hard cases. This article’s thesis is that university managers have a duty to shareholders alone. Shareholders are those who own the university. This duty is satisfied when managers satisfy the fundamental project shareholders assign to a university.